Our picks for Free at the Fringe

There
are more than 170 free performances and events during this year's First Niagara
Rochester Fringe Festival. So if you're looking for a night on the Fringe without
stretching your wallet, there's likely a program out there for you.

To
search through all of the free programs, we suggest using the "Find a Show"
function at rochesterfringe.com, and
refining your search with the "Only Free Shows" option. But if you're crunched
for time, here are seven free shows at the Fringe we recommend.

STREB
in SEA (Singular Extreme Actions)

Three
stages, a live DJ and "Extreme Action Heroes" come together to create
stomach-dropping performances with flips and falls that will make audiences gasp.
Each half-hour production is packed with intense athleticism, choreographed by
world-renowned performer (and former Rochesterian) Elizabeth
Streb. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of STREB, the
show will test the human body's strength across three stages on Parcel 5.

STREB
will perform as part of the Friday and Saturday on the Fringe programs, all free,
with music from KOPPS, The Demos, and more.

In a
Fringe first, the Street Beat dance battle is sure to get heated as teams of
three compete for the chance to win $1,500. Some of the region's best dance
crews have signed up, so expectations are high for stiff competition and crazy
moves.

Sponsored
by ImageOut, the Rochester LGBT Film
Festival, "Two 4 One" is a light-hearted, sweet comedy that will take viewers
through the struggles of gender identity and a progressive take on modern love.
The film is directed by Maureen Bradley, and follows what happens when the
transgendered Adam tries to help his ex-girlfriend Miriam artificially
inseminate. But the pair wind up sleeping together and both end up pregnant.

"You've
got red on you." This hilarious film, paying homage to all of the great zombie
flicks, follows Shaun (Simon Pegg) as he and his
friend Ed (Nick Frost) find themselves in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The
characters aren't extraordinary at crisis management or unrealistically great
at fighting off zombies, and that's what makes this film gold. Directed by
Edgar Wright, this is a chance to start the Halloween and horror movie season
early.

Two hundred
actors will line Gibbs Street to perform some of your favorite Brothers Grimms tales. Walking through Gibbs, while speaking and
interacting with characters is the trick for this show. Produced by Method
Machine, the show is not only exciting for its unpredictability but for the flash
mob-esque vibe. If you love the traditional Grimms' stories, you should see this alternative storytelling
bring it a new life.

Also,
hang around Gibbs Street for more free music, art, and performances for the
second weekend on the Fringe.

(Friday,
September 23, and Saturday, September 24, 6 p.m.; Along Gibbs Street and in One
Fringe Place; Appropriate for all ages)

The
Campbell Brothers

The
Campbell Brothers have made their way across the country and back, from
California, to Washington, D.C., and back to New York. The Rochester-based band
gives listeners high-energy beats intertwined with African-American gospels for
a sound that brings plenty of soul. The band has been together for more than 20
years but keeps the variety and flavor in its music alive.

(Friday,
September 23, 9:40 p.m.; Gibbs
Street Main Stage; Appropriate for all ages)

Sand
Mandalas

Sand
mandalas are temporary, and that's what makes them so beautiful, according to
artist Katie Jo Suddaby. The art form is known as a meditative practice, an
escape from reality's stresses and worries. Suddaby's
sand painting will take days to produce and seconds to disappear. Take a peek
during the weekend to see this year's one-of-a-kind piece and try to absorb some
of that contemplative energy.

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In This Guide...

Everyone has a September 11 story -- whether it's an eerie
coincidence, a "where I was when I found out," or a "my neighbor was there" --
but perhaps none can tell the story of that fateful day quite like someone who
was in Manhattan when the Twin Towers collapsed. Steven Fetter, who grew up and
worked in the city, has a story like that.

I started off day three of Fringe by catching a screening of
the little-seen documentary, "Muddy Track" at the Dryden Theatre -- the
only Fringe event held at that venue this year. Scheduled as part of the
Dryden's series on the films of Bernard Shakey (the
pseudonym used by musician Neil Young in his little-known career as an
independent film director), the screening was retrofitted to fit the Fringe
lineup and the film makes a great addition.

Hallie Flanagan is not a well-known name today, but in the
1930's she was vastly influential as the director of the Federal Theatre
Project, a WPA initiative that sought to employ actors, writers, designers, and
other out-of-work theater professionals by assigning them to "theater
enterprises" throughout the United States, many in areas that had never seen a
live play before. The project was a great success, but to New Deal-hating
politicians, subsidizing "culture" -- including plays that seemed to have a
leftist political message -- was an unpatriotic waste of money.

My Sunday at Fringe began with "Next Fall," a Geoffrey
Nauffts play directed by Thomas Markham and staged at
TheatreROCS. The show is about a group of family and
friends struggling to reconcile differences in faith and sexuality.

It was sort of a bummer that only about a dozen people
attended the first staging of "The A-is-for-Abortion Play" at the TheatreROCS venue, which can hold an audience of 700. The
meager attendance might be explained by Fringe-goers wanting to spend their
Saturday afternoon on more uplifting productions, but the show's subject is an
ever-important one -- and this point was hammered home a few times in the course
of the story.

Left for Dead Improv split
my guts with its astute deadpan and quick wit. In front of a packed house at
Writers & Books, the group took shots at individual stories whose
characters had maxed out on their quirk quotient.

PUSH Physical Theatre, the brainchild of artistic
directors and founders Darren and Heather Stevenson, has a satisfying
repertoire built from the local company's 16 years in existence, but it's
always exciting to see a new piece. The Fringe audience Saturday night at the School
of the Arts' main stage was shown the world premiere of "0's and 1's," a work
still in progress.

Every year at the Fringe, I look forward to attending the RIT
Student Honors Showcase, the annual event held at The Little Theatre that
highlights student work from RIT's School of Film and Animation. It's always
fun to see what the talented group of up-and-coming filmmakers are up to, and
this year's program didn't disappoint.

Admittedly, I was never a huge fan of "Little House on the
Prairie." But I knew enough about the show that I got the joke each time Alison
Arngrim (who played Nellie Oleson) referenced it
during her debut Rochester Fringe Festival performance of "Confessions of a
Prairie B;+@h" at School of the Arts.

I started the second day of Fringe with a chamber quartet, The
Chanson String Quartet to be exact, who played pieces focusing on death so
gingerly and gently that the audience in the near-empty Xerox Auditorium (the
TheatreROCS Main Stage) didn't quite know where or when to applaud. The group
played Camille Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre," naturally, and one of my favorites
-- didn't think I had one, did you?

There were almost too many performance choices on opening
night of the Fringe (a good sign, of course, for the festival's fifth year). After attending the opening night party where we toasted to the success of 500
shows taking place over the next 10 days, I headed to School of the Arts on
Prince Street.

Well, that was a beautiful way to start my 2016 First Niagara
Rochester Fringe Festival. A buzzing crowd filled the Strasenburgh Planetarium
for a resurrection of "Anomaly," which premiered to acclaim
at the 2013 Fringe, and has already sold out its 2016 run.

The Spiegeltent strikes me as a steampunk spaceship sent down
to teach us the art of the spectacle. In an unrelenting fast-paced show, a sold-out
crowd was treated to Cirque Du Fringe -- jugglers, contortionists, dancers,
acrobats, slapstick comics, one guy who balanced 10 spinning plates on sticks
the way I saw it done on the Ed Sullivan Show, and two maniacs with crossbows.

My first evening of Fringe began at School of the Arts, where
RAPA presented Dramatic Space's
debut production, "Somnium." The zany adventure story
started with the premise that a small group of scientists had observed that
there was more to CERN's discovery of the Higgs Boson "God Particle" than
previously thought.

The 2016 First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival runs Thursday, September 15, through Saturday, September 24, and City Newspaper will be out EVERY NIGHT of the festival covering multiple shows. Check in first thing each morning for photos and reviews of the previous night's entertainment, listed below by date.